Emissions of greenhouse gases are measured and reported as major indications of environmental problems. Emissions aren’t the relevant measure. They distract us from what is relevant to human well-being. They lead people to say, “I exhale and poop. Life requires pollution,” and conclude action won’t work. To be more precise, they feel like they conclude, they actually just rationalize and justify the preconception they wanted. They miss that fossil fuels’ effects are locked in from the moment they enter the biosphere, well before they are burned and emit greenhouse gases.

The relevant measure for fossil fuels is extraction.

There are two types of pollution and depletion. I’ve written about the difference between emissions from the two processes in Know the 2 carbon cycles and don’t confuse them.

The first type is through biological processes that happened before humans existed, like exhaling, pooping, and even forest fires. Lighting started forest fires before humans existed. The second type is through bringing materials that have been outside the biosphere since before humans existed into the biosphere. The materials in fossil fuels have been outside the biosphere for tens to hundreds of millions of years. Homo sapiens has only been around 250,000 years. Homo erectus and other Homo ancestors go back about 3 million years. From the view of any human existence, fossil fuels have never been in the biosphere until about 2 hundred years ago.

Since biological processes merely shuffle carbon around the biosphere, their emissions 1) don’t increase the total carbon in the biosphere so can’t permanently contribute much to atmospheric greenhouse gases and 2) biodegrade—that is, life finds uses for all of it, as all the relevant processes have happened for long enough for evolution to find uses for it.

Introducing fossil fuels into the biosphere does new things: 1) It introduces new carbon into the biosphere so it can increase the total amount of greenhouse gases and 2) it introduces materials that don’t biodegrade and do accumulate.

A question I believed I knew but hadn’t looked up the numbers on was the relative contribution from each. What if the fossil fuel contribution was negligible compared to forest fires.

Which contributes more?

The data is clear: fossil fuel pollution dominates pollution from biological processes, at least to the extent “land-use change” (see definition below) describes it. The graphs below show CO2 from both sources, which some would argue isn’t pollution. It is when it’s new to the biosphere, at least beyond a certain threshold humanity passed long ago if your measure is people being deprived of their life, liberty, and property without their consnt.. Meanwhile most other pollution comes solely from fossil fuels, as life can biodegrade most other materials that come from biological processes.

Here were the relative contributions from a couple years ago, in CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels and land-use change, World, 2023. Fossil fuels contributed over 10 times more.

I looked up the paper that Our World In Data got the data from to learn what “Land-use changes” meant. The paper was Global Carbon Budget 2023, published in Earth System Science Data, which seems to be a peer-reviewed journal. It said:

The net CO₂ flux from land use, land-use change, and forestry (E_LUC, called land-use change emissions in the rest of the text) includes CO₂ fluxes from deforestation, afforestation, logging and forest degradation (including harvest activity), shifting cultivation (cycle of cutting forest for agriculture and then abandoning), and regrowth of forests (following wood harvest or agriculture abandonment). Emissions from peat burning and peat drainage are added from external data sets, peat drainage being averaged from three spatially explicit independent data sets.

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Here are the results going back to 1850 CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels and land-use change, World. The graph above is just the last point from the plot below. Fossil fuel pollution has dominated since just after WWII.

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Breaking the data down by region back to 1850, CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels and land-use change. Fossil fuel pollution has dominated nearly everywhere except South America. I guess clearing the world’s largest rain forest adds up. Still, CO2 is catching up there.

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Here are similar results from NASA, Emissions from Fossil Fuels Continue to Rise. Again, fossil fuel pollution dominates.

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From the UK Government Office for Science‘s Guidance Trend Deck 2021: Climate change Published 28 June 2021, similar patterns of fossil fuels dominating, this time including other greenhouse gases.

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Carbon offsets and dreams of sequestration exacerbate our situation.

Claiming that offsetting Type 2 pollution and depletion by reducing Type 1 doesn’t work. That is, planting trees doesn’t offset extracting fossil fuels. On the contrary, believing it can motivates more Type 2 pollution and depletion.

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For future reference, I found most of the above results searching on “CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels and land-use change, World.”

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EDIT: Two more relevant plots from the paper I quoted above, Global Carbon Budget 2023:

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